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Tennessee Is Going To Ban All Abortions On Thursday With No Exceptions

Rosalyn Morris
4 min readAug 23, 2022

Doctors who perform abortions will face mandatory prosecution, with the onus on the physician to prove a mother’s life was in danger.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

On Thursday, August 25, the state of Tennessee will ban all abortions — with no exceptions for rape, incest, or the mother’s life being in danger. According to the Tennessee Human Life Protection Act, life will begin at fertilization.

Let’s be clear — not having an exception for rape or incest is bad enough. This means that children as young as ten will be forced to give birth.

In July, a ten-year-old, a victim of child sexual abuse, was denied an abortion in the state of Ohio. The child had to cross state lines, to the state of Indiana, in order to have a legal abortion performed by a doctor.

The total ban in Tennessee claims to have an exception for mothers whose lives are at risk, but it doesn’t without requiring the physician to make an “affirmative defense” in a Tennessee court proven by a “preponderance of the evidence” that the mother’s life was in danger. Make no mistake about it, this lack of clarity is by design, as “The Legislature could have written the bill to say the statute applies only if the abortion is not done to protect the life of the mother.” Abortion will be a Class C Felony. Doctors will face

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